Shale oil

After decades of rising prices, hostile foreign suppliers and warnings that Americans will have to bicycle to work, the world faces the possibility of vast amounts of cheap, plentiful fuel. And the source for much of this new supply? The U.S.

“If this is true, this could be another dominant American century,” said Brian Wesbury, chief economist at First Trust Advisors, money managers in Wheaton, Ill.

U.S. natural-gas production is growing 4% to 5% a year, driven by sharply higher shale gas output. Shale gas production is forecast at 7.609 trillion cubic feet this year, up 11.6% from 2011 and 12 times the 2004 level.

Understanding why companies succeed or fail is critical to our investing success. Broaden your reading to include international politics and economics. I don’t agree with everything the authors say but I find Why nations Fail (video lecture): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRAkz13cpsk&feature=related fascinating. Click to see the lecture by one of the authors.

A Summary of the Book

1. So Close and Yet So Different: Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, have the same people, culture, and geography. Why is one rich and one poor?

2. Theories That Don’t Work: Poor countries are poor not because of their geographies or cultures, or because their leaders do not know which policies will enrich their citizens (or the leaders may know but seek to preserve their own interests).

3. The Making of Prosperity and Poverty: How prosperity and poverty are determined by the incentives created by institutions, and how politics determines what institutions a nation has

4. Small Differences and Critical Junctures: The Weight of History: How institutions change through political conflict and how the past shapes the present

5. “I’ve Seen the Future, and It Works”: Growth Under Extractive Institutions: What Stalin, King Shyaam, the Neolithic Revolution, and the Maya city-states all had in common and how this explains why China’s current economic growth cannot last

6. Drifting Apart: How institutions evolve over time, often slowly drifting apart

7. The Turning Point: How a political revolution in 1688 changed institutions in England and led to the Industrial Revolution

8. Not on Our Turf: Barriers to Development: Why the politically powerful in many nations opposed the Industrial Revolution

9. Reversing Development: How European colonialism impoverished large parts of the world

10. The Diffusion of Prosperity: How some parts of the world took different paths to prosperity from that of Britain

11. The Virtuous Circle: How institutions that encourage prosperity create positive feedback loops that prevent the efforts by elites to undermine them